


The Stench of Copper

by moonlight_sonatina



Series: Short Stories [1]
Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asphyxiation, Gen, One Shot Collection, Other, Real Life, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25250239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlight_sonatina/pseuds/moonlight_sonatina
Summary: A short story in which a man discovers that pursuit of money can be fatal...
Series: Short Stories [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138022





	The Stench of Copper

His pockets sag like shut eyes with tired bags. Golden tears drip, drip, from the holes and spin on the pavement with mocking glee before falling dead on their fronts. Many get an unofficial burial by plastic debris in the wind. 

Shining leather shoes sweep the stony ground, tossing fragments of polyethylene. 

A man runs, his tie trailing in the wind like a lifeline, his breathing ragged and short.

WIll he make it in time?

Coins glint as they fly from his open pocket, falling with a cold, toneless melody. But no matter how many he loses, the stench of copper - so alike that of blood - still clings to his pale fingers. Fingers stiff from tapping on a keyboard for days and weeks and months.

He must get away from it.

He stumbles, doubling over. His black tie sweeps the ground and is trapped under the heel of his black shoes, and he tumbles, the tie tightening in an unrelenting knot around his throat. HIs breathing shudders as he falls forward, smacking his nose on the merciless stone. Rich crimson spills into his vision and onto his hands. It smells.

But he does not see anything wrong, for that smell has been on his hands for his entire life.

Grappling at the knot at his throat, he convulses, gasping for just a whiff of oxygen. Heat rushes to his face as he struggles, struggles. More blood streams down his fingers as his nails tear at the knot in the coarse fabric. 

Civilians step past gingerly, their eyes averted form the man suffocating on the pavement. Maybe someone else will help him.

After all, they cannot allow an outlier on the street to ruin their agenda; to stain their comfortable cycle of life with uncertainty.

At that moment, the man sees his life flash before his eyes.

He is...

On his father’s shoulders, watching two squirrels chase one another up a tall oak tree.

On a glittering beach in the Bahamas, laughing as his mother dunks him in the hungry waves.

In a colourful, airy classroom amongst other small heads, all craning to watch a bespectacled man tell an enticing story.

The man’s muscles begin to tense, deprived of oxygen.

His life continues to play before his eyes, the colours losing saturation and durning drab like a monochrome video reel that was in the process of being coloured.

He is in a bathroom, his cheeks wet thinking of his mother’s reproval.

He is in a different classroom, sitting cramped at a rigid, wooden desk before a droning teacher scrawling intangible symbols on a whiteboard, willing the plain clock on the wall to show him mercy; but it continues ticking at the same slow, metronomic, perpetual, mundane pace as everything else.

Tick. Tick.

He is in a Principal’s office, forced to stand at the old woman’s desk in his uncomfortable uniform and black tie and receive a sharp rebuke; a reminder that he should study hard and pass his exams and get a job and earn money and be like everybody else. He is not special and no one should be.

She taps her pen down on her desk to add emphasis to certain words. _Study._ Click. _Pass._ Click.

Now, he is in a room full of square desks and teenagers, the silence only punctuated by nervous breaths, shuffling papers or boots. And unforgettably, the rough scribble of pencils scratching, tearing, tracing, flicking. 

In a small, neat room, he sits opposite an equally neat dark-haired woman and speaks confidently with rehearsed lines, before reaching forward to grasp her hand in a firm, professional handshake.

In a cramped spinning chair, he sits before a bright monitor covered in endless tables, tapping on a keyboard for hours on end, with his only thoughts of the money he had to earn.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

This morning, he rushes out of his apartment, desperate not to get to his job interview late.

He could never have known that he would end up on the ground, choking from his own tie.

Because he had been running, he had tripped and fell from his own pursuit of money.

All of a sudden, something slips between his fingers.

The knot comes away as easily as breaking a paper chain, leaving a throbbing, cochineal bruise on his neck.

He lies there.

He is still.

He is alive.

For the next ten minutes, he savours the feeling of oxygen in his lungs. Eventually, he rises to his feet, and looks around him.

He looks in the face of every self-serving person who left him, lying in the street, to die.

He looks at the interminable trail of golden coins and paper he had left as he ran.

He looks at the threadbare black tie that he had worn for almost all his life that was almost the thing that ended it.

He looks at the shoes that he had taken pride in shining from the advice of the principal that he had adhered.

He looked up.

The blood moon shone brightly, sitting with a company of twinkling stars on a carpet of indigo sky. 

On a nearby oak tree, two squirrels chased one another.

He looked back down at his work clothes. Was he going to spend the rest of his life like this? He remembered the bright, saturated colours of the first half of his life, and how they had dulled for the last ten years.

Slowly, he walked to a red telephone box. 

Sliding his last coin into the slot, he raised the phone to his face, only to notice that his hands no longer smell of money. The phone rang twice, then stopped.

“Mum, do you remember the beach?”

**End.**

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading. Any constructive criticism or comments are appreciated!


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